Transgression

The Offensively™ Horrifying™ Shock™ of Shocking™ Offensive™ Horror™

“If transgressive art once carried risk, now it is merely a veneer of danger for art consumed by the same elite it pretends to unsettle. The forbidden is now franchised. The profane has become a PR strategy.

The transgressive man plays at revolution, but would faint at the first whiff of gunpowder.

You are not a destroyer of idols, but a high priest for a new religion that traded the sublime for the shallow, the transcendent for the trite.

Autobiography is a crutch for the talentless. Who cares if Daddy hurt you? Transform the anecdotal into something greater. Dress your wounds in pastel-coloured gauze to match your dance floor outfit.”
— Ramon Alanis

“New York—where I live—is perhaps the epicenter of the specific brand of pseudo-transgressive behavior that the Neo-Decadents rail against. Too many here confidently hold on to the counterculture of the middle of the previous century, and enough of them have cultural power or audiences that it validates itself, and seems elevated, in a way that a rural Dad, who wears a Led Zeppelin shirt and screams at the politicians on a loud television that overpowers the sound of his porn-laden cell phone ringing with a call from a scorned ex-wife, does not. The counterculture sold well and sold out. First for rock and roll and then for rap. When I see someone dressed like a late-’60s rocker walking down the street, colored shades on with wispy Beatles hair, I get sad, and hope they are going to a costume party, though I know they are not.

This is likely because the culture that the counterculture was countering seems to have largely dissolved. The transgressive impulses of anti-bourgeois art and fashion, the shit-covered performance artists in Austria, the pierced ears and mohawks of London, and the psychonauts of California were always aesthetic. It’s also likely that transgression does serve to reinforce bourgeois norms, though it’s unclear what those norms are anymore, which makes the transgressive cosplayer seem adrift. Now, the heirs of the counterculture flail about for something to transgress against, settling their sights on the so-called professional-managerial class and an, admittedly sometimes annoying, but not by any means hegemonic ‘wokeism.’

Since normative power is financial, everything is permitted, it seems. Shock and boundary crossing is as routine now as the hackneyed political speech of the mid-century. The state of it is so bad that to be a monarchist or traditionalist has, for the last few years in Manhattan, at least, come to represent a certain transgression—a trend that I can’t imagine anyone will be proud of, and certainly won’t continue, as this slimy century turns on. Many have resorted to saying ‘retarded’ as a transgressive act; the transgression of children in an imaginary playground, where everything is smoke and mirrors; where everything is air.

For the heart of the empire, the only transgression is the original one, I’d wager—Murder.”
— Ben Dreith

“So-called ‘transgressive fiction’ as typed out by Bourgeois Caucasian Family Men and Tattooed Normie Mom types has to be one of the most genuinely ludicrous and pathetically virginal examples of contemporary grifter fraudulence. The aesthetic is redolent of the worst of the long-expired ‘Apocalypse Culture’ of the 1980s, by way of secondhand ideas from William S. Burroughs (himself a rather dated influence at this point), all delivered in the semiliterate prose of American-style horror fiction and flaccid Dennis Cooper pastiche. The only thing being ‘transgressed’ is the patience of anyone with taste, discernment, and familiarity with real life.

In interviews with contemporary transgressive specimens, it’s clear they haven’t changed their influences since they were teenagers. The same handful of Underground™ names is reeled off (Sade, Lautréamont, Ballard; we note that the ‘transgressive canon’ has been hastily cobbled together, with the unfortunate writers therein press-ganged into doubtful duty, their works in truth having nothing to do with each other), along with a handful of predictable filmmakers (Lynch, Cronenberg), and ‘extreme’ or ‘harsh’ musical projects that no one with any musical knowledge would pay the least mind (is there anything truly extreme about tuneless, grating ineptitude?). Given that a full quarter of this century has now elapsed, the avant-garde desperately needs to graduate from teenage boy ‘shock’ material. The naked reality of global capitalism is more degrading than any bucket of fake filth, and the surface texture of our everyday lives has already been baked in more monstrosity than the ‘transgressive’ imagination is capable of honestly confronting.

A final word needs to be added on the theme of ‘occult’ content in books of this sort. We suggest that those attempting to use occultism as a sort of ‘scary’ garnish kindly desist, as the results are much, much more embarrassing for the actual practicing occultist to read than can really ever be described. ‘Virgins writing about sex’ does not even come close. Occult Fiction is tired of the transgressive, and longs for a cease and desist.”
— Justin Isis

“Transgressive writers are terminally confused with regards to the markedly different natures of ‘shock’ and ‘confrontation.’ The goal of ‘shock’ is to reinforce an audience’s values by presenting a superficial opposition; thus, shock is an inherently reactionary endeavor. Confrontation, however, sets out to challenge an audience’s values by presenting a more nuanced opposition. When an audience is confronted rather than shocked, its established values may not change or be compromised, but these values are forced to be recontextualized. But neither, when isolated, and often both in the same hands, can save a piece of sham transgressive lit from poser oblivion. Billy Joel's ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’ is, by a great measure, more adept at confrontation and Bush-Sr.-era cartoon Joe Camel advertisements encouraging children to pick up smoking are more adept at shock than the good lot of the cartoonishly bottom-barrel slam metal grade brutality and monkey-at-a-typewriter faux-French ‘formal experimentation’ transgressive lit.”
— Colby Smith

“Transgression is a broad subject, and my thoughts on the topic are vast, complicated, conflicting, and difficult to encapsulate. On the one hand, I can claim with perfect authority that one of the few regrets of my life is how much of my twenties I wasted buying/reading/thinking about the work of Peter Sotos, when I would have been much better served using that time to study, say, the aesthetics of well-designed Scottish golf courses. On the other hand, I find it unfortunate that writers such as Ballard/Burroughs/Mishima are often lumped into the category of ‘transgressive art’ by both disciples and detractors alike, which to me seems very reductionist. Aside from the fact that their books were not only reflecting and commenting on the world and society of their time, they also often read as intensely personal psychic explorations of their own inner spaces, and thus do not exist merely to provoke (granted, Ballard did once famously say that with his novel CRASH he wanted to ‘ . . . rub the human face in its own vomit, then force it to look in the mirror,’ but his delivery of said desire was so posh, I think it can be forgiven). It should be observed that the modern transgressor makes a habit of evoking the avatars of long-dead (and far superior) artists in the hope that some of their borrowed brilliance will illuminate themselves, but this is vanity and folly, for these craven whoresons are mere copycats at best, total nonentities in terms of personality or creativity. Aleister Crowley, after all, was a polymath, a man whose many accomplishments included scaling mountains, playing a mean game of chess, and turning Victor Neuburg into a camel. Many so-called transgressors of our era, by comparison, seem incapable of even balancing a checkbook. It is a sign of the decadence of our culture that we have seen a decline of the polymath and the ascension of the specialist . . . the irony being that there is often very little that is special about the latter.

What I find mordantly amusing now is seeing so many of these so-called transgressors assuming the moral high ground as they bemoan the fallen state of Western culture. These self-proclaimed wreckers of civilization, with their staged autopsy photos, their Dennis Nilsen pantomimes, their toilet ghost anthologies, their Hollywood-endorsed body horror, these lovers of the Abject, vivisectors of the Uncreated Light, deluded cartographers of an infinite geography of Astroturf annihilation, fetus eaters, Apocalypse Culturists, and (most of all) these fetishists of Fascist iconography, they expect pity from us now that they have not the heart to face the world they dredged into being, this unprincipled crypto-fascist nightmare that is the true, ugly face of their utopia. Rather than bray against Donald Trump and his ilk, they should in fact bow and pay homage, for these counterfeit potentates and false powers of darkness are loathsome egregores of the transgressors’ own sickly aesthetic, the ne plus ultra of their diseased and disordered psyches. This amoral, disgusting, and fundamentally disorganized and broken world is the mirror they fashioned to reflect back their own amoral, disgusting, and fundamentally disorganized broken selves. For who else should we blame for the death of civility, the death of decency, the death of standards, and the death of truth, other than the filthy drug-addled hippies with their Operation Mindfuck, the Messiahs immersed in jars of piss, and Hassan-i-Sabbah’s evil creed ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’? One can only praise the sky god Tengri for inspiring the Mongols, under the command of Hülegü Khan, to not only bring down Alamut, but also for the burning of Sabbah’s accursed memoir, the Sargudhasht-i Bābā Sayyidinā.

If I sound overly harsh on this subject, know that it is because I myself once walked amongst the transgressors, until I realized at some point in life that, unlike the beardo pornographers who draw their sustenance from the tears of the hurt and wounded, I was spiritually more aligned with the God of the Apocalypse of St. John of Patmos, the one who wipes away every tear from all eyes. To paraphrase Hal’s rejection of Falstaff in Act V of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Fourth, Part Two: ‘How ill white hairs become a deviant and transgressor! I have long dream’d of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane; But, being awak’d, I do despise my dream.’
— James Champagne

“Any art under the label of transgression sadly gets a bad name for a sad trend of milquetoast contrarianism stuck in breaking 19th and 20th century taboos into the 21st century.

I think this mark of the beast transgression carries is not a problem, as it allows one to wade through bullshit with an authentic love—like that the sexless cinephile has for the rare Italian giallo with the ever longer name—that I never get tired of. But, in time, the world will get tired of it, as transgression evolves. You need new taboos to break.

Unlike many of my peers quoted here, and having befriended many of them for these differences and the undeniable shared interest this contradiction brings, I enjoy most art branded transgressive, even that branded tradsgressive (think ‘Apocalypse Culture,’ serial killers, etc), partly for nostalgia, but I think the only true transgressive was Nick Zedd, founder of the Cinema of Transgression. Obviously, I am partial to him, since I did his last interview as my first published work. This is related to why I'm even writing here, as Zedd's Transgression (capital T) was one as radical as that presented by the cultural revolution of Neo-Decadence. It had a discipline and integrity to it, and he never finished telling it to the world—but he would want us to break different taboos. Zedd legitimately thought all film schools should be blown up, when most would just say so as a painfully ironic quip. In his films specifically, he was just doing what he wanted, and in some cases, boring shit he'd never admit to, like rebelling against structuralism. I firmly believe when he died in 2022, Transgression was born more than it died. You don't want to, or you shouldn't want to hear about that, if you want to make transgressive art. You should get art done in poverty, to allow life to thrive in filth and larvæ in our artwork, to make a film any way we can, and fuck it up. You should not only look to the future, but break it in order to play with it, awaiting New Transgression like a child happy with preemptively broken toys.”
— Salvattore Beteta-Reyes

“Regarding the subject of ‘transgression’ in a literary or artistic sense, it might be worth trotting out ‘Sturgeon’s Law,’ which is to say that ‘ninety percent of everything is crap.’ This certainly applies to the field of comic books, where I occupy a peripheral position, but despite an astonishing amount of crap, I am not giving up on the ‘biff-bang-pow’ medium. Similarly, all the new age mystic-lite content that chokes my Instagram feed will not make me waver in my interests regarding occultism or spirituality. To focus on the ninety percent is to risk becoming a reactionary, and to abuse a cliché, throw the baby out with the bathwater—or in the case of ‘transgression,’ to throw a microwaved baby out with the bathwater.

When thinking about ‘transgression’ in particular, it might be useful to view this field from the vantage of two distinct factors: ‘motive,’ and ‘intent.’

For ‘motive,’ the question should be asked: Is the artist genuinely obsessed with their themes and subjects? With the example of the supreme transgress-o Peter Sotos, I think we can mostly agree that the answer is yes. Sotos doesn’t care what you think, and he writes about what he does because he wants to, or maybe even needs to. And he does so with such an intensity and idiosyncratic style that I would be just as interested—or maybe even more interested—if he were writing about model trains instead of sexual violence. It’s the force and conviction of a worldview that draw me in, not the particulars of the subjects. (And for anyone willing to look past the early Pure work, they might be surprised to find that Sotos does in fact cast a wider net than his reputation suggests, covering subjects such as second wave feminism and modern art, to name a few; that he aligns these secondary interests alongside his primary deviant interests, creates an even more complex and intriguing perspective, and one I’ve repeatedly found worth in.) Ultimately, so long as the artist isn’t being a dilettante or a mere edgelord, transgressive themes can be just as worthy of exploration as anything else.

‘Intent’ is slightly more complicated. If the artist’s intentions are aesthetic (or even educational), then the work should be judged by such terms. But what if the work is designed and intended to ‘shock’? For the sake of argument, let’s just assume there is some value in ‘shocking people out of their complacency,’ ‘rattling the cage,’ etc. This raises the question of audience. If the ‘shocking’ and ‘transgressive’ artwork is only witnessed by a niche fanbase already accustomed to microwaved babies, and eager for more, then there is no shock, no transgression. There is nothing but a set of empty signifiers and genre tropes, no better or no worse than KISS makeup or a Saw sequel. But what if the microwaved baby is on a billboard or a Coke can? Better yet: what if the microwaved baby is a mass-produced latex sex toy available from Temu—and advertised on Facebook?

What if your mother saw it?

Now we’re getting somewhere.”
— Aaron Lange

art by Aaron Lange